U.S., U.N. Deplore N. Korea Nuke Actions

CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA

Published
8:00 pm EST, Sunday, December 22, 2002

Associated Press Writer

The U.N. nuclear watchdog said it deplores North Korea's decision to remove U.N. seals and surveillance cameras from nuclear facilities that U.S. officials say could yield weapons within months. Washington and its allies urged Pyongyang to rescind its decision.

North Korea on Monday began removing U.N. seals and "disrupting" cameras at a laboratory used to extract weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel rods, said the U.N. agency acting as the world's nuclear watchdog.

"There isn't any legitimate purpose for the facility other than separating plutonium from spent fuel," a step in the process of making nuclear weapons, said Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA.

North Korea indicated Monday the "nuclear issue" could be settled if the United States agrees to a longstanding demand for a nonaggression treaty.

"The U.S. should stop posing a nuclear threat to the DPRK and accept the DPRK's proposal for the conclusion of a nonaggression treaty between the two countries," the North's official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said in an editorial. DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The United States, which is South Korea's chief ally, says it wants a diplomatic solution, but opposes talks unless North Korea first abandons nuclear weapons development.

North Korea's nuclear ambitions also dominated a previously arranged Monday meeting between South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and successor Roh Moo-hyun, who won last week's election. Roh, who takes office in February, has advocated dialogue to resolve the nuclear problem.

The IAEA, which has been monitoring the facilities, said Pyongyang this weekend unsealed a spent fuel storage chamber that holds 8,000 irradiated fuel rods.

"If they restart them, particularly the reprocessing plant, which will start producing plutonium, then we are in a pretty dangerous situation," Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA director-general, said Monday on CNN.

ElBaradei said he has discussed the situation with North Korea's neighbors, the United States and members of the U.N. Security Council.

"Nobody would like to negotiate under a nuclear brinkmanship and that's what's happening right now," he said.

State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said, "The 8000-odd spent fuel rods are of particular concern because they could be reprocessed to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons."

A senior Bush administration official says that while North Korea broke the seals, the United States does not believe the canisters containing the fuel rods have been opened.

Unclassified U.S. intelligence reports presume North Korea has one or two plutonium-based nuclear weapons. The issue, in the U.S. view, is not North Korea acquiring the bomb but rather North Korea building more bombs and sharing them.

Pyongyang's move Sunday raised fears of a nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula similar to one involving the same facilities in 1994. At that time, officials in Seoul and Washington feared a heightened possibility of war with North Korea.

Conflict was averted when North Korea agreed to freeze the facilities in a deal with the United States. But it said Dec. 12 that it planned to reactivate them to produce electricity because Washington had failed to follow through on a pledge to provide energy.

North Korea said the Vienna-based IAEA failed to respond to its request to remove the equipment, compelling it to do so itself.

The IAEA said the seals and surveillance equipment had been removed from the spent fuel pond, which stores the fuel rods, at the 5-megawatt, Soviet-designed reactor in Yongbyon, 50 miles north of Pyongyang.

Fintor said spent fuel rods had "no relevance" for generating electricity. Their unsealing "belies North Korea's announced justification to produce electricity," he said.

Security experts believe North Korea made one or two nuclear weapons using plutonium it extracted from the Yongbyon reactor in the 1990s. Now there are fears it will reprocess plutonium fuel rods that were separated from the Yongbyon reactor, and later stored under supervision by IAEA inspectors.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that diplomatic efforts are under way between North Korea, its neighbors and the United States.

"There are a variety of interactions taking place," Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers told a Pentagon news conference Monday that North Korea's claim it needs electricity from the nuclear plants does not hold up to analysis.

"They don't need a nuclear power plant," Rumsfeld said. "The power grid couldn't even absorb that."

Myers said the plant "adds negligible electricity to the power grid."

South Korea, Japan, and France have strongly criticized the North Korean action.

Russian Nuclear Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev confirmed Monday that North Korea started relaunching its nuclear program and also expressed regret over the decision, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported. He also was quoted as saying the U.N. nuclear watchdog "has not given a proper assessment to this fact as yet."

The announcement by the North's state-run news agency, KCNA, that the monitoring equipment was being removed was part of a dispute that has been escalating since October, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted it had a secret nuclear weapons program based on uranium enrichment.

The program violated several nuclear arms control agreements, and Washington and its allies suspended shipments of heavy fuel oil to the energy-starved country that were required under the 1994 deal. Instead of giving up its nuclear program, Pyongyang said it had no choice but to revive old nuclear facilities that were frozen under the same agreement.